Argosy Book Store.

Maman coffee. ☕️

In New York City for a few days with family. Amazing time. Got to see Maybe Happy Ending last night which I loved.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I expect a lot of people to be bothered by ChatGPT Health. Of course you shouldn’t use AI as a replacement for a human doctor. And what about privacy? AI for health questions has actually gotten really good in the last year. It’s better at explaining lab results. It’s better...

It has been an unbelievable nine years since I launched the Kickstarter for Micro.blog. Even after I finally published the book online, a few things still nagged at me about the structure and text. I had hoped in the last couple of years to address them. Actually running Mic...

I mentioned this on our bonus episode of Core Intuition last month, but I don’t think I’ve blogged about it… Sometimes AI will come up with something and I’ll think, “Damn, that is better than what I would have written myself.” Annoying! My only fix is to edit nearly everything to make it my own.

I wrote most of my book years ago, so this is the first time I’ve actually run it through AI to get some feedback on structure, redundancies to trim, and grammar problems. It’s valuable, but it’s also leaving me with doubt that I didn’t have before. Let’s say I let AI come u...

When I experimented with not federating my posts for a few months, I also accidentally muted everything from Mastodon. Now that I’m seeing everything again, I’m not sure my life is better. Perhaps there should be a preference to temporary hide external posts — Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, etc.

Sean Heber blogs about the continued devaluation of software, comparing it to Zork in the 1980s.

In 2026 there is going to be more software than ever, much of at least AI-assisted if not outright slop, and so more competition. More indie developers, but maybe fewer successful ones.

Intrigued by the upcoming LEGO smart bricks. It’s crazy what is possible now. I ordered a few widgets from SparkFun the other day to experiment with… So tiny and powerful.

Satya Nadella started a new blog at the end of 2025. A couple interesting things about it… There is no mention of Microsoft, so it feels like a personal blog, and he quotes Steve Jobs:

A new concept that evolves “bicycles for the mind” such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute. What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals.

Also his blog is using Hugo.

Great post today by Ben Thompson on the changes coming in the future, even as AI replaces some jobs:

All of that could very well be replaced by AI, but the point is that the history of humans is the continual creation of new jobs to be done — jobs that couldn’t have been conceived of before they were obvious, and which pay dramatically more than whatever baseline existed before technological change.

There will always be something to do. And humans will always seek out art and writing and anything crafted by humans, because we feel a connection with it.

John Voorhees revived his old Objective-C app with Claude Code and came away floored:

What I see is the foundation of a fundamental shift in the economics of building and maintaining apps. […] Will new opportunities emerge for indie developers to serve even narrower user segments as the time and effort to build new utility apps drops?

Yes. Small developers (especially generalists) have a new competitive advantage because they have all the capability of larger teams and none of the bureaucracy.

My book has about 65 short chapters. Each chapter has a quote at the beginning. I thought it would be fun to gather all of these together in a blog post, so here they are. (They aren’t in book order.) It’s not all the quotes in the book. There are hundreds of block quotes an...

Last week I started making one final editing pass on my book, trimming some sections and adding new text for Bluesky and other recent social web developments. I’ll publish all the changes soon. This will really be the last time I touch the text.

Can’t believe I’m just now learning that the people mover in the Houston airport was built by Disney (WED, now Imagineering).

A short video with some clips from driving to Lake Brownwood this weekend. Apparently I say “stopped real quick” frequently.

Driving back into Austin there was an incredible view of the huge moon low over downtown, just touching the UT tower. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Almost pulled over to take a photo, but instead I snapped this from the car. Kind of neat in its own way.

Longhorn Cavern State Park.

Wind power, rail power.

Hiking at Lake Brownwood State Park, came up on this red cardinal.

Stopped for a view of the sunset along the road to Brownwood, with Honda Element micro-camper.

Joan Westenberg’s blog post this week is such a perfect start to 2026. It sets the tone for what we should keep working on throughout the year. Just picking out a few things to quote… On the value of exploring ideas through longer blog posts: You can write a post working th...

While traveling last week, I found myself thinking back to when Kindles came with free cellular connectivity. It’s a minor problem, but it’s not worth the trouble of connecting a Kindle to hotel wi-fi, so if juggling multiple devices you miss sync. I’ll sometimes read on both a Kindle and my iPhone.

Working on support for standard.site in Micro.blog. I had blogged earlier this year about potential AT Proto lexicons for long-form posts, but I didn’t get much feedback, so I’m happy to follow the work that has already been done here by Leaflet and others.

Watched: Down Cemetery Road S1E1, Almost True. I haven’t been able to get into the other new shows that everyone seems to love. I thought this was a very strong start, though. 📺

Ben Werdmuller on LLMs for coding:

I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away.

I’ve been saying some variation on this too. Is the art the engineering work or the final product? Tech generalists are going to be very successful.

Starting the new year with some Micro.blog home page tweaks for signed-out users. Added a new Atmosphere page with an overview of Bluesky and AT Protocol features.

Watched: LotR: The Return of the King, Extended Edition. I always forget that it’s actually four hours long. Still a few nitpicks but not enough to overshadow some amazing sequences. What I blogged in 2002 generally about the film adaptation also still feels right. 🍿